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Category Archives: Vol 4.4

Striving for a Cure at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research

By Katie Hartigan, VI Form

 

Striving for a Cure at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research

Seattle Children's Hospital logo. (PRNewsFoto/Seattle Children's Hospital)

As my eyes scanned the people seated at the conference table around me, I admired each one of them immensely. To know that I was sitting in a lab meeting with the faces behind the statistic “93% remission rate for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia” was astonishing to me. I stared up at the projector screen taking in the jargon that I partially understood, trying to decipher each scientific discovery and hoping that one day my name too would follow some great breakthrough displayed on a similar projector screen.

In the spring of my junior year, I was selected to travel to Seattle that upcoming August to work at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. (more…)

The Mask: Art Inspired By The Loss of My Grandfather

By U Jin Jo, IV Form

The Mask: Art Inspired By The Loss of My Grandfather

see-the-inside-of-me“Do you ever wish you could just take off your mask and show people what is going on inside of you?”

I have been asked this question multiple times before. However, I never really understood what it meant before I experienced the death of someone whom I loved. In fact, his absence is still hard to believe today.

My grandfather – my best friend, my mentor, my everything – passed away two years ago when I was in 7th grade. The pain of the loss was unbearable for my 13-year-old self. However, having to tough through each day of school, I maintained the bright smile on my visage and carried my sadness within me. Day after day, I became more tired of burying my feelings inside. Eventually, I could no longer hold back the tears that flooded inside of me. I needed to show people what was going inside of U Jin Jo.

For this piece of art, I wanted the background to be important without having too much information because I wanted the focus to be on the inside. Hence, I used red acrylic paint and created a gradation behind the person. For the hair, I used a black felt-tip pen for the hair-like patterns. Under the mask of the girl, I wanted the section to express an entirely different feeling than the rest of the page because it is the focus of this piece. I looked through fashion magazines and cut out images of thunderstorms, clouds, and tears to create an ominous collage. Everything else was done in pencil. (more…)

La Crise des Réfugiés: Une Comparaison

By Jenny Deveaux, VI Form
La Crise des Réfugiés: Une Comparaison
Editor’s Note: The assignment in Advanced French–Francophone World:“Create an infographic screenshot-2016-11-08-00-55-47that makes a comparison between the refugee crisis during and after the second world war and the current crisis in 2016. You may identify some guiding questions of your own.”

(more…)

The Future of Libraries and the St. Mark’s Library

By  Coco Zephir, Head Librarian

The Future of Libraries and the St. Mark’s Library

img_6605Libraries are ever changing in both form and function. One aspect currently at the center of library innovation is user-experience (UX). UX focuses on meeting the needs of patrons to improve their experiences by making them more impactful and meaningful. UX is a reiterative process that involves constant conversation with your community. Libraries using UX are implementing human-centered design, or design thinking, to better understand their patron base. Human-centered design, “focuses on defining and then resolving concerns by paying attention to the needs, aspirations, and wishes of people” (Peet 2016). (more…)

Get Well Soon: Dialogue in the Style of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”

By Mei Mei Arms, IV Form

 

Get Well Soon: Dialogue in the Style of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”

Editor’s Note: The purpose of this creative writing assignment in IV Form Writing Workshop was to build a better comprehension of implicit and explicit facts in writing pieces and to become acquainted with a specific creative writing style. Students chose to emulate the writing style of one of three short stories read in class: “Harrison Bergeron,” “Hills like White Elephants,” or “Cathedral”.  Students were expected to employ the same literary devices that the authors of the original short stories used. Those who chose to imitate “Hills like White Elephants” were expected to convey a message without directly stating it. 

The room held flowers, cards, balloons, bears, and stale air.  The flowers had long since lost their sweet aroma to the cruel hands of time.  Cards sat unread.  Those shiny stiff “get well soon” balloons still bobbed halfheartedly in a corner by a window.  Along the bed sat bears, tens of them, their kind bead eyes meant to make you feel some sort of happy, but were left collecting dust with (more…)

Eat This, Not That!

By Both Long, Modern Languages Faculty

Eat This, Not That!
What we eat determines who we are. Our mental and physical performance on a day-to-day basis is heavily reliant on what we use for “fuel.” Our bodies really are our temples, and we should take care of it with the right stuff. But what is the right stuff? How do we get it? Does it taste good? In my Saturday course Eat This, Not That!, students learn about nutrition and how to construct a healthy lifestyle by understanding how much our food choices impact our bodies. The curriculum offers an exploration of each of the nutrient groups and its importance to our diet. Students study current dietary trends and fads regarding diet recommendations and food policies.

Our students were asked to begin their Saturday class studies by thinking deeply about the eating habits of their peers and members of the community. Each student was able to quickly identify somebody in their life that did not eat consciously or somebody whose health they were worried (more…)